Rails on Maui

Programming in Paradise

About Justin Gordon

I have been passionately writing software since 1985, focusing on Java since 1996 at several startups and with Ruby on Rails since 2011.

My consulting practice has grown. Here’s the story: Who is ShakaCode?

Please contact me at justin@shakacode.com if you’re interested in Rails consulting. This blog is created using Octopress, as described here.

“Would you bet on a NASCAR driver who can’t drive stick? No? Then fire every developer who doesn’t use Vim or Emacs.”, the “Hipster Hacker” on Twitter.

Links to Details

Some Bullets

  • Rails projects: http://www.blinkinc.com/ and a several other startups.
  • I use ideaVim inside of RubyMine and IntelliJ and Evil (vim) mode inside of emacs. And almost everything I do is backed by developer written tests. Recently, I switched to Spacemacs.
  • Experienced and passionate software engineer with a track record of successful projects.
  • Responsible for majority of design and coding of the core storage layer behind the Gartner 2012 leading program for product master data management: InfoSphere MDM Collaborative Edition. This involved tons of TDD along with tons of experience optimizing Java code in Yourkit, and inventing clever time and space solutions, including binary data stores and distributed caching.
  • Love programming in Ruby on Rails and the whole wonderful ecosystem of Heroku, Amazon EC2, jQuery, coffeescript, haml, sass, etc.
  • Close connections to the Jetbrains team and expert with their tools: IntelliJ and RubyMine.
  • Love writing tests in rspec, and phantomjs with capybara is simply amazing. Finally, developers can write tests on the full stack, including all client side javascript.
  • Twitter Bootstrap rocks.
  • Previously specialized in Master Data Manager for Product Information Management.
  • Thought leader in doing Test Driven Development in the context of enterprise software.
  • Author of open source project “Dependent Object Framework”, which vastly simplifies and accelerates JUnit testing with persistent dependencies.
  • Former speaker at Dr. Dobb’s SD West Santa Clara, Architecture and Design World Chicago, and SD Best Practices in Boston. Talks were on “JUnit and Test-Driven Development: Why and How in Enterprise Software” and the “Dependent Object Framework for Enterprise TDD”.
  • Tons I didn’t mention, but stuff you’d expect given my experience. Here’s a few more things I like using: postgres, tmux, yaml, json, rubygems (too many to list), and the Canary’s webkit debugger.
  • Graduated in 1991 with an AB magna cum laude in applied mathematics from Harvard and received an MBA from UC Berkeley in 2001.

Outside of Programming

Besides writing great software, Justin enjoys the ocean sports found in Maui, and has done quite a bit of home improvement, having designed and built the Sugar Ranch, a B&B (pending application) where he lives with his family. You can read more about Sugar Ranch here http://www.sugarranchmaui.com/ and here: http://www.facebook.com/sugarranch.

Map of Sugar Ranch.

As you drive up to Sugar Ranch…

The back side of Sugar Ranch…